High and low in Ulan-Ude

Before I left Australia, A friend was telling me about her experiences in Russia. She said she found it a place of emotional extremes, and that she found herself laughing one moment and cursing the fact she came the next. My experience in Ulan-Ude quickly showed me what she meant by this.

My easy going work-it-out-when-you-get-there attitude seem to work for me in most instances, however I have noticed that it has severely failed me on several occasions where planning has been necessary. My arrival into Russia was one of these instances. As I mentioned earlier, I have been on the move pretty much constantly since leaving Beijing. Within 12 hours of arriving in Mongolia I was out on a jeep trek in the Mongolian steppe, however before leaving the capital I booked my train ticket from Mongolia to Russia. I booked it to Ulan-Ude as I had read some nice things about the place. When I got back to the capital of Mongolia I had to get straight back on the train to Russia. While on the train I realised that the train arrived in Ulan-Ude at 10:30pm, I hadn't booked any accommodation and I hadn't had a chance to change any money into roubles. I had a feeling this might be a problem, and it was.

Leaving the station immediatly felt quite obviously like a foreigner, as I had a massive backpack and was walking around hesitantly with a map. I did a number of laps of the СBD before finding an ATM that would accept my card and give me roubles. I did find one but I didn't feel all that safe knowing I was now carrying 5000 roubles in cash, it was midnight and that I still had to find a hotel. There were large numbers of drunk russians hanging around the city and while several of them had approached me in an unfriendly manner, while I was walking to a hotel a group did come up and give me a beer to drink. While I was drinking this another man that I had noticed following me earlier approached us and told the Russian guys to leave. He did it in a way that was as if he was doing me a favour, and then offered to show me to the hotel I was looking for. We were conversing in Russian, so I was not sure exactly what he was saying. I started to get a bit of a bad vibe about him and told him no, and that I was leaving. He stopped me and asked me a question in Russian that I didn't understand, but it ended in 'chelovek', a word for man. I then realised what was going on. He was asking me if I liked men, and was trying to pick me up.

Naturally I beat a hasty retreat, turning around and walking down another street. This street was quite poorly lit at the start, and degenerated to near darkness by the middle. One thing I have noticed about manholes in Russia is that they very rarely are covered. You can obviously see where I am going with this. Luckily for me there was a piece of metal about a foot from the surface that my foot landed on, so I didn't fall down the hole, but it was enough to send me sprawling onto the road cutting my hands. Of course the first thing I did was look around to see if anyone saw me. Luckily the people drinking in the park opposite hadn't noticed.

I found the hotel I was looking for, and it was of very dubious quality. There was a casino style thing on the ground floor and shifty looking people in the lobby. I managed to make myself understood and get a room. The door of the room didn't lock and there didn't seem to be a toilet nor shower on the entire level. Not that I looked around that much, I wedged a chair under the door handle and went to sleep.

The next day I booked a ticket to Irkutsk that left on the evening train, left my luggage at the station and went to explore the town. First of all I checked out the worlds largest head of Lenin, and it was definitely very large. It was kind of bizarre seeing people going about their daily business with such a monolith mere meters away. There were some beautiful wood lace houses, and as I was walking around the backstreets checking them out I was approached by an interesting looking character. He was wearing skin tight leather pants, a leather jacket, and had black slicked back hair. He could speak a little English and I could speak a little Russian, however the combined conversation was still quite stunted. His name was as 'Slava', however his friends (and he himself) called him 'Crazy Slava'. Turns out he was quite into rock and roll, and I imagine he saw me as a fellow 80's hair rocker. We went to a bar, bought some beers and had a conversation about rock which went along these lines "You know Jimmy Hendrix?", "Yes", "Good or Bad?", "Good" , "Yeah!" Slava makes air guitar sounds and motions", "You know Axle Rose?" etc...

After a while at the bar, we went and picked up his Mongolian mate named Balor. We went to Slava's place, drank Armenian Cognac and watched an old VHS tape of a guns and roses concert. After much air guitar and Cognac Slava passed out and Balor and I went to meet a friend of his. I forget Balor's friends name, but both of them were very helpful and interesting. They made it their mission to help me accomplish all of the errands in needed to do before getting on the train, they showed me to an Internet cafe, tried to track down a payphone that was working and wrote me a list of Russian words they thought I needed to know (including cure, hospital, husband, kitchen, police and skin head. I don't exactly know why these words made it on to the list). We bought some beers and they took me to the train station and saw me off. Nice guys.